White Jesus

We tend to make God in our own image—literally. Many conservative Christians find black depictions of Jesus in art as odd, a sort of self-serving reinterpretation of history for personal or ethnic reasons. It is actually. Equally so are the representations of Jesus as white. Jesus was not white-skinned. He did not have brownish or blonde hair—more likely a very dark brown or black. He did not have blue, gray, or green eyes. He did not have the long flowing hair of medieval art. Jewish men cut their hair short at least once a year. He was a Nazarene, not a Nazarite which are two completely different things. For that matter, Adam and Eve did not likely have white skin either. They had in them the genetic make-up of all the races with a much more generic appearance and would have looked to us as racially indistinct. If we had actual photographs of our favorite Bible characters, we would be shocked.

“You mean THAT is King David?!”

Yet many Christians accept obviously historically inaccurate depictions as normal since we have been accustomed to seeing them since childhood. The most prolific Bible storybook illustrators—Betty Lukens and Frances Hook–the people that produced all those flannel graph figures that I gazed upon as a child–seemed to have little interest in depicting the people in the Bible stories as they appeared historically. Jesus was white, often surrounded by adorable blonde and red haired children. Not only is Jesus white, there is no brown-skinned child in sight!

Our willingness to ignore historical reality is a symptom of a deeper problem. I am not intending to judge the motives of good-hearted Bible illustrators for the last hundred years, or Christian art for the last 1500 for that matter. I am concerned about willful ignorance. White Jesus speaks to our innate selfishness and self-interest. Instead of diligently seeking the truth that the scripture conveys, we are often quite willing to reshape what the Bible teaches into a false truth that better fits our own sensibilities and desires. We often do this under the guise of trying to make Christ “accessible.”

We choose what is comfortable.

Comfortable Christianity, like our favorite t-shirt or well-worn pair of jeans is really appealing. Like the listeners of the last days we want to “heap to ourselves teachers having itching ears” (2 Timothy 4:3). We want a Christianity that tells us what we are comfortable hearing.

We want to enjoy what is familiar.

We prefer what we know over what we do not know. Because of that we have the horrible habit of bringing the familiar worldliness of our past lives into our New Testament Christianity and develop our own worldly form of Christianity as we continue in the sins to which we have become accustomed (Romans 6:1-2).

We doggedly hang on to what is traditional.

For those of us who have grown up in Christianity, it is easy for us to idolize tradition. What we have always done becomes the standard for what we should always do. Our tradition, while often beneficial, might not always be right and tradition can be corrupted over time. Jesus threw off corrupted tradition for the sake of the genuine gospel (Matthew 15:1-20).

We look for an easy Christianity.

New Testament Christianity is anything but easy. Just look at Christian history. The enabling power of the Spirit makes the impossible possible, but we have no promise of an easy walk through this life (John 16:33). Paul’s Christian experience was tortuous at times. However, even in the middle of persecution, difficulty and trial, we are more than conquerors through Him that loved us (Romans 8:37).

I am not trying to present any type of “woke” Christianity. But like the unbiblical notion of  White Jesus, we need to surrender our comforts and preconceptions on the altar of biblical truth. Under the guise of making Christ seem accessible we make Him unrecognizable. Christ-likeness is not making Him like us, it is rather us learning to be, in heart and life, like Him.